Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Benjamin Britten: the more violent the society, the more violent will the individual be...(Opera "Peter Grimes")

In Benjamin Britten’s Opera, Peter Grimes, the composer
develops the theme of the struggle between the individual and the society.
One
of themore
cogent and penetrating insights of this intersection, according to Britten, is
that the more violent the society, the more violent will the individual be.

While the last few decades may not top the charts
for violence, there is clearly a more ubiquitous and incessant dissemination of
the violence humans are perpetrating on one another. And like the bursting
bubble of 2008-9, first in the housing market in the U.S., the conditions in
which these acts of violence occur have changed. They are no longer isolated
and manageable. They are no longer mere incidents, or even accidents, although
those continue. They are no longer able to be remediated by a single agent.
They spill over borders, political ideologies, languages, time zones and other
economies.

We have engaged in a run-away global economy, in
which the corporations have a distinct advantage over the various governments
charged with responsibility for public policy including regulation of the
corporations, for cleaning up the messes (frequently initiated by the bankers
and financial markets) when the collective centrifuge blows apart. It is a lot
easier and compelling to remove a dictator, for example, than to replace that
dictator with a level of governance, laws, and social policies that take care
of the needs of the people who live in that country. Libya, Iraq, Tunisia,
Yemen, are some of the nations in which chaos, violence, and the complete
fraying of the social fabric have replaced the dangers and threats once posed
by the dictators, many of whom were “allies” of the west, and the news out of
those places was mainly “settled” and predictable.

Today, the various theatres of violence, failed
states, migrant refugees and instability are ripe opportunities for forces
never before even contemplated let alone planned for. And once having left a
deep deposit of military hardware in their abandoned fighting fields, the
United States is experiencing, and the world is witnessing, the slaughter those
weapons inflict in the hands of the terrorists. Just as Donald Rumsfeld, envoy
of then president Ronald Reagan, conveyed “weapons of mass destruction” to
Saddam Hussein in the mid-eighties, so too has the world’s military super power
(albeit indirectly) fueled the current violence in the Middle East. And one of
the things about this period of history is that such complicity is now out in
the open for all to see and to contemplate and to measure.

And, caught in the vortex of its own “power” the
United States is continuing to ship arms not only to other nations, along with
Russia, but it has engaged in a massive sale of weapons inside its homeland.
When the arsenal of power is dependent on the gun (not exclusively) then that
arsenal is already participating in its own demise. Devising preventive
techniques toblock the acquisition of
arms from “undesireables” at home, while expanding the international shipment
of bigger and more explosives around the world is a bi-polarity that is simply
and utterly unsustainable. The hornets’ nest of political voices that
perpetuate the dependence on the bullet, both at home and around the world, and
the culture in which that nest lives and even grows, is one that would find any
restrictions on the development and sale of those arms repugnant. Little boys,
and increasingly little girls, in such a culture, will come to believe and act
upon the notion that violence is a remedy for whatever blocks their individual
and narcissistic paths. Exporting violence, as a way of life and a means of
sustaining its balance of payments, merely enhances the opportunities of those
who would seek to deploy violence in their own little worlds, in whatever
country they may exist.

The NRA, the proliferation of arms for all law
enforcement including school guards, the dissemination of the argument of
self-defence backed by a weapon, in the purse, under the pillow, in the glove
box, in thebrief case, and yes even in
the college classrooms and the sanctuaries of churches and the absolute
contempt for any push-back from even the parents of lost children in Sandy
Hook, for example, cripples both the spirit of the nation of the United States,
and the capacity of the rest of the civilized world to give thatcountry the kind of respect it could enjoy,
if it were deliberately and openly to put curbs on its dependence of the
bullet.

Of course, there is significant evidence that the
United States also provides generous amounts of support for worthwhile causes,
like the fight against AIDS in Africa, and many other such examples. And that
generosity of spirit must not be denigrated. However, linked to both the
addiction to corporate profits of its main corporate citizens, and to the
delusion that military power is the guarantor of national and personal
security, this generosity can be and is only tarnished and reduced significantly.

Even the language of its political discourse is
infused with killing, wiping out the enemy, fatal blows to the enemies, (in the
rhetorical sense) as examples of potential leaders who might occupy the White
House. Not only does this language and weapon-infested culture bespeak a
neurotic masculinity so frightened of losing control as well as dominance, it
also entraps successive generations of young men who are innocently and naively
emulating their fathers and grandfathers.

The male individual who does not subscribe to the
“win-at-all-costs” formula, even if it means obliterating the enemy, is far too
often dubbed “girlish” or worse, “gay” or even worse, “fag”....And when we
combine the ‘first-and-last resort’ to weapons in all conflicts in the U.S.
with the emasculation through poverty, unemployment and hopelessness of the
people of both genders who have barely enough money to survive, the American society
demonstrates its commitment to violence and the individual is its victim.

In yesterday’s column in Truthdig.com, Chris Hedges
call all Americans Greeks, reduced to
the serfdom of the masses dependent on the miserly bail-out of the rich and the
powerful. Americans, however, may consider Greeks to be at least on the leading
edge of the bail-outs, for we all know that after the ensuing bail-outs that
will be required to “reconcile” the $1.3 trillion in state debt, there will be
empty vaults under the control of the wealthy and the powerful for those still
in line.

While the violence continues on the battle fields,
on the oceans and through the air, behind those horrific scenes, big powers are
engaged in an interminable campaign of manufacturing, marketing and exporting
weapons of all kinds around the world. Weapons in the hands of the hopeless
regardless of their ethnicity, ideology or religion, still constitutes a dangerous
marriage.

And remember Britten’s
linkage: the more violent the society, the more violent will be the individual
in that society.